Remember the Saudi plan of last year to have Morocco and Jordan join the Gulf GCC? So what happened to that Saudi plan? Are they working hard in Riyadh on modalities for Jordanian and Moroccan membership? Does the complete silence on this issue relate to the fact that Morocco is now more of a constitutional monarchy that it was last year? Is it related to the fact that the Star Trek king of Jordan is being pressured to allow freer elections? But that is exactly what the Bahraini opposition is demanding: to have a constitutional regime like Morocco. Yet the whole GCC establishment and the Wahhabi-tribal-liberals rose against the Bahraini people and their demand. That is what some of the Gulf tribal-Islamist opposition claim to be seeking, but selectively: they strongly oppose a constitutional monarchy for Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. They must think the al-Saud princes and al-Khalifa kleptocrats are fonts of wisdom that can’t be replicated through any election.
As for Qatar and the UAE and Oman, they claim that they already have the most unelected unrepresentative democracy that money can buy (actually can’t buy in the case of Oman). The al-Saud princes are slightly different: they have the least democratic and least representative and least free system that oil money has a hard time buying.
Cheers
mhg
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